The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that “The mayor of Hoschton, a nearly all-white community 50 miles northeast of Atlanta, allegedly withheld a job candidate from consideration for city administrator because he was black.”
City councilman Jim Cleveland defended the mayor, saying:
“I’m a Christian and my Christian beliefs are you don’t do interracial marriage. That’s the way I was brought up and that’s the way I believe,” he said. “I have black friends, I hired black people. But when it comes to all this stuff you see on TV, when you see blacks and whites together, it makes my blood boil because that’s just not the way a Christian is supposed to live.”
I wonder which passages in the Bible speak to interracial marriage.
I saw the results from a survey conducted a handful of years ago which asked whether people “approved of” interracial marriage (not whether they would consider being in one, etc.). The numbers were not far from 50%, with blacks and Hispanics slightly above, and whites and Asians slightly below. Whatever happened to freedom?
That’s a lot more words than the fourteen his kind usually use.
chigau @1: God got really pissed at Miriam and Aaron for objecting to Moses’ marriage to an Ethiopian woman. I don’t know how Southern Racist Christians interpret the passage, but I’m sure there’s a lot of bullshit involved.
@Mano:
Why, Mano! Your fellow FtB bloggers are not influencing you in the direction of increasing sarcasm, are we?
Rob Grigjanis #4
♥♥♥ The Bible.
Racism causes leprosy. For seven days.
@chigau No. 1
Deuteronomy 22:10-11.
And yea, the whole Zipporah thing.
: )
I saw a post about this on “Progressive Secular Humanist” yesterday. I will say the same thing here: those people should be out on their asses immediately with a Federal Civil Rights lawsuit bankrupting them.
I saw a sign a few years ago which read” “Sarcasm is the body’s natural defense against stupidity”. And from Thomas Jefferson: “Ridicule is the only defense we have against unintelligible propositions”.
@2 Matt
Matt needs to update his poll numbers.
That 50% is from the 1960’s.
That 20% opposed to interracial marriage is not as bad as it looks.
It’s the same number as people who think the sun orbits the earth and can’t diagram the solar system, Geocentrists.
20% of the US population will believe anything, no matter how counterfactual it is.
Opposition to interracial marriage is however, much higher in the southeast USA.
No surprise.
He’s just citing the black guy for a perceived violation of commandment 0. The wording varies but it mostly means “If I don’t like it God doesn’t either.” Seems to be a real favorite among the commandments too. Even people who barely give a nod to the others still follow that one.
Commandment 1/2 seems to be “The rest of this text is for other people” a bit too often for my tastes.
Raven, saying something is “morally acceptable” and saying you approve or disapprove are two different things. There was a judge (down south, of course) who refused a marriage license to an interracial couple because “he’s seen how these things turn out”. You can recognize that something is morally acceptable because you can’t come up with a valid argument against it, but still not approve of it.
You are using semantics more than making a concrete argument.
A different wording in a poll from 2017 shows that only 9% think interracial marriage is bad for society.
What half the people say, is that they don’t much care one way or another.
Raven, how a poll is worded can have a huge impact on how people respond. We see referenced to this all the time on atheist blogs. For example, “What is your religious background?” Is a bad poll question because it assumes the respondents HAVE a religious background.
There are many things I disapprove of which I don’t consider “morally wrong”. Gun ownership, not recycling, voting Republican, snowmobiling in national parks, etc. People may argue that interracial marriage is not a good thing because “their cultures are too different”, but that isn’t the same as saying it’s morally wrong. Sometimes semantics matter.
Matt G at #2, I know that Raven corrected the statistics, but the answer to your question is…Your free to do whatever I tell you to do. Signed, every Christian
I still dont get what the councilman was trying to say, He says he hires black people which is what the issue was about -- where did inter-racial marriage come into it ? Looks like he spends a lot of time thinking about things that are forbidden.